The Family Secret by AJ Carter

Author:AJ Carter [Carter, AJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

The trip back to Puriton felt a lot longer than it really was. None of us said a word until we were almost there, and even then, it felt like Mandy was saying something just for the sake of breaking the uneasy silence.

‘What will you tell your parents?’ she asked Kyle. ‘About why you’re drenched.’

‘I’ll just say I got caught in some rain.’

‘They’ll know it didn’t rain.’

Kyle didn’t respond to that, focusing solely on the road ahead of us. It felt like forever ago that Jason and I were leaving this place for good, and now I felt like an unwelcome visitor. I’d vowed to abandon the people of my home village, so why should I be welcomed back? Worse than that, I worried about what Mum and Dad might say about my return. After everything I’d put them through that night…

When we got to the heart of the village, Kyle stopped the car on the side of the road to let us out. It was right beside a lane that streaked between an entire estate and separated his house from ours. Only it looked dark, cold, and uninviting.

‘Thought I’d let you walk the extra two minutes so your folks won’t wake up to the car,’ he said, starting to shiver even with the heating on full blast. ‘But before you go anywhere, we need to promise each other something. We need to swear never to tell another living soul about the things that happened tonight.’

‘There will be cameras,’ Mandy offered. ‘People seeing your car come and go.’

‘Then we’ll say we went out for a drive or something.’

‘As long as we keep our stories straight,’ I piped up. ‘It has to be ironclad. All of us keeping exactly the same details and not straying from it by even an inch. If there’s something we missed, just tell the police or whoever that we don’t remember.’

They both agreed to that, and we all sat there for as long as it took to come out with a strong, cohesive story. There were details about how we met with Jason and then he went home, how we smoked cigarettes in one of the parks that wasn’t the Apex, and then how we headed home and went straight to bed. Clean, simple, and reliable.

Mandy and I left the car and went right through the lane. Mandy stopped when we emerged on the other side, right across the road from our home. All of the downstairs lights were on, and silhouettes glided past the curtains.

‘Looks like they’re still up.’

‘And so begins the inquisition,’ I said.

‘How are you feeling?’

Not great, I thought, because I’d just killed and buried the only man I’d ever loved. Strangely enough, there was a niggling feeling that the easy part was done and now we had a lifetime of lies to keep going. The very thought of it made me sick – I hated lying so much, and I wasn’t even any good at it. This was going to take some work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.